Bressie opens final live podcast tour with football star as guest
Westmeath footballer, Luke Loughlin, is to be the guest when broadcaster and mental health advocate Niall Breslin takes to the stage at Tuar Ard in Moate on May 2 the first date of his final ‘Where Is My Mind?’ live podcast tour.
Niall (Bressie) is looking forward to going deep with the young sportsman who has opened up publicly about his struggles with addiction: “I’ve been following Luke for a long time and never actually got to speak to him properly,” says Bressie.
“He’s one of the top footballers in the country and he’s massively looked-up-to but he had serious drug problems and had to go to recovery and rehab and it’s how he approached that; how he communicated that; how he – at a time when the world feels slightly absent of good male role models – is definitely one of them.
“The thing about it is we all go through challenges and adversity and we all hit walls and [it’s about] how he got through it and how he’s turned around and he’s sober and he’s playing the best football he’s ever played.
“It’s really important that young people hear that and hear those stories from people like him.”
Bressie has another reason to look forward to the live event: it marks the end of the 18-month-long tour he has been doing with the show. He is also bringing an end to the ‘Where’s My Mind’ podcast, and the final broadcast is three days after the Moate show, on May 5.
Bressie, who is currently working on his PhD at Trinity, isn’t completely giving up life behind the microphone: six months ago, he secured his own BBC Radio 3 show, ‘Classical Wind Down’, which is on air each day from 6pm.
“It’s three hours of kind of classical and neoclassical music; it’s just calming music,” he explains. “The whole tone of the show is to kind of calm people and ease them down at the end of the day.”
Some of the pieces he selects; some are selected by the producers.
“I absolutely love it. My mum’s a classical musician, so my background growing up was very much surrounded by classical music.”
Bressie’s training as a member of the Mullingar Cathedral choristers has also influenced some of his choices: “A lot of the music on it is Gregorian chant as well – a lot of the pieces we would have learned while we were choristers and a lot we would have performed. It’s really quite interesting [to go from] having performed it and learned about it for most of my life to actually presenting it. It’s just quite a nice experience.
Around all of the touring, podcasting and broadcasting – as well as his engagement with his ‘Lust for Life’ charity, Niall has been doing the work required to obtain his PhD. He can’t see himself completing that this year, and is earnestly hoping that he does get it wrapped up next year.
The PhD in on mental health intervention. “I need to focus on that: it’s a fair test and it’s a fair challenge, so the podcast – much as I loved it – it was just too much, trying to carry on with everything,” he admits.
“We’ve had global experts on and the last thing you want to do is find yourself in a conversation on a podcast with them and not knowing what you’re talking about so you have to put a lot of work into it. So, six years… I think it’s a good thing to walk away.“
It was a couple of years before beginning the podcast that Bressie went back to education. “I went to do my master’s in 2017. I went to the UCD School of Psychology to study mindfulness and then I’ve kind of been in academia since – not just with the PhD: I did some other stuff in performance psychology and stuff.”
In one sense, he almost can’t believe he’s been so long in academia, and that he enjoys it so much: “It’s an area I absolutely love – but I didn’t love school: I didn’t like school at all, so it’s kind of a strange situation to find myself back in embracing education the way that I am.”
Bressie doesn’t do one-to-one work or guidance. He knew straight off the bat that being a therapist was not what he wanted to do: “I’m more kind of interested in the kind of systems that look after us, the health systems, so that’s what my PhD research is in – how do we create better systems to support people and how to hold government to account in that regard.”
Although perceived in the public mind as a passionate advocate of mindfulness, Bressie makes clear he doesn’t see it as the be-all: “I think it’s oversold and diluted: I think people tell everyone that it’s the thing they’ve all got to do, but it doesn’t suit everybody and what I say to a lot of people, given the chaos of the world, is if you’re feeling anxious and stressed, ‘of course you are – so am I’.
“It’s been an incredibly overwhelming ten years across the board and I often think we throw these things to people and tell them that this will solve it.”
In his experience, mindfulness is most effective when used with or by children, from an early intervention point of view and so the charity he co-founded, Lust for Life (now in 45 per cent of Irish primary schools) does teach it – but also focuses on teaching mental skills and understanding the mind.
“I think the key, for me, and the core of my PhD research, is that we need to support children early: it makes a profound difference, and I don’t think we’re doing that enough, so I think mindfulness can be useful.
“I think a lot of people might feel they annoyed when they hear the word but for me it changed my life, but I don’t assume that that’s going to be the same for everybody.”
The schools programme is a-ten-week offering, completely free; evidence-based, and with the imprimatur of DCU and UCD, who have evaluated the programme. A second-level schools programme is being piloted.
“Our aim is to have a complete coherent plan from first class to Leaving Cert within the next two years and to be in every school in Ireland within the next three to four years.”